Light and Momentary

Downhill, gracefully

When I was in college I imagined 47 as a really advanced age. Like, social security lay just around the corner, and centenarian status would arrive a year or two after that. My mom was only in her early 40s when I was in college, and she was plenty old by my 19-year-old lights.

I thought that I was in a narrow window of attractiveness, and I worried constantly that I wasn't pretty enough. I worried about my hair and my skin and my teeth. And oooohhhh, did I worry about my conversational skills. Was social anxiety a formal diagnosis in 1989? Because if it was in the late-80s DSM, they should have put my picture next to the entry.

And I thought I was supposed to be at my peak.

I didn't know that I would eventually figure out how to de-fuzz my hair. I didn't think my skin would ever clear up. I scowled in most pictures, because I thought that smiling made my face look fat. 

It's true that gravity and sun have changed the look of my limbs, but I appreciate the muscles they have developed and the miles they have carried me. I no longer have a 19-year-old's hands, but these 47-year-old hands can knock together a pie crust and settle crying babies and play guitar comfortably and toss off thousand-word angst-free essays. I don't wear bikinis here in 2017, but this is an acknowledgment of something that was also true in 1989: I don't like wearing bikinis. I have never felt as comfortable in my own skin as I do here in my late 40s.

It helps that I am married to a man who finds me beautiful and tells me so regularly. It helps that I am mostly out of the phase of life in which men looked me over appraisingly. (It happened to me recently -- at church, for crying out loud -- and I shuddered. Blech!) Today I was scanning pictures for some college friends and remembering viscerally the anxiety that I felt when they were taken.

I'm glad I'll never be 19 again. Fear not your forties, my younger friends.

Deeply delicious salsa verde

Half a pound of tomatillos in this week's CSA pile, and they dove bravely into the food processor to meet their fate. They were joined there by a clove of garlic, and a baby onion (maybe the equivalent of an eighth-sized wedge of an ordinary onion), and the leaves from a small bunch of basil, and a hot pepper, and a quarter-teaspoon or so of salt. This is based on a Crescent Dragonwagon recipe that called for cilantro instead of basil, but all of my cilantro has bolted and I had basil sitting wistfully in the crisper drawer.

Verdict: yes, please. I made it as a relish-y thing to serve atop calamari, but after dinner one of the boys said, "Could you just leave the salsa out so I can keep eating it, maybe with chips?" Yes indeed, I said, because I'm pretty sure the organic tomatillo part cancels out the pile of chips part.

No snail queens here

This morning was my annual exam. I was still sitting up when the assistant handed the speculum to the doctor, and I was surprised to see it glowing with LED light. "Whoa!" [she said articulately] "That's high-tech! It's like, Queen Amidala gets a pelvic exam!"

"If you'd looked you would have seen a light-up speculum in years past," said the doctor (who was really kind of a pill today, now that I think about it). "We've been using these for years."

The trouble is that you can't see the speculum while lying down, unless you have eyes on stalks like the gastropod version of Queen Amidala. And how, a person must wonder, could such a creature put her foot in stirrups?

The Axe Report

Remember how I was feeling pessimistic about a manuscript I resubmitted at the beginning of June? I had labored over that sucker, but rejection seemed like the most likely outcome. I was trying to view it as an opportunity for spiritual growth, by which I mean I've been attempting not to react physically when I open my email, with flinching body, wincing grimace, and squinting eyes (so I could sort of see but not very well).

In the past few years I'd had two bruising rejections from journals published by my professional organization, one of them especially heartbreaking. I'd published elsewhere in the meantime; I'd also published in both of those journals with a different first author. Even so, I was still feeling gun-shy about submitting a first-author manuscript to the flagship journal, and the tone of our initial reviews did not help at all. I knew that I could find a home for it in a lower-tier journal, but I really did not want to rewrite it for another editor.

Then! Today! The email came! The subject line set off an immediate adrenaline response, so potent that it took me a minute to calm down and figure out what the decision actually was. It was...(hurray!)...minor revision!

Reviewer 1 is happy. Reviewer 2 is nitpicking. The editor even said, albeit more diplomatically, "Reviewer 2 is nitpicking." I can do some nitpicky revisions to get another first-author pub in the flagship journal. I won't even complain about them. I am so relieved. It's still not 100% certain that they'll accept it, but it's a whole lot more likely now that this paper will appear where I hoped it would appear. (It would be pretty weird if they rejected it at this point -- not impossible, but pretty unlikely.) Big thanks to Our Lady Untier of Knots for her intercession.

24 on the 24th

We were married 24 years ago today.

At the county nursing home

This summer I said yes to something I'd been thinking about for ages: I learned how to take communion to nursing home residents. One of the deacons taught me what to do for a service at a nearby retirement village, where the residents are fairly independent, and it went fine. I was a little surprised when he said I should tag along with someone named Pat for a service at another facility, but he was right. It was really different.

I held the pyx in my lap as we drove together from the church to the county nursing home, and I thought again about the wonder of it: that the One who spread forth the universe has chosen to be contained in the host. It wasn't until we arrived that I learned why the deacon wanted me to tag along this time. The residents at the county nursing home are frailer and older than the folks at the retirement village; many of them are confused and no longer ambulatory. So instead of a corporate communion service, where the residents walk down to a little chapel, the EMHCs go to them. The activities director maintains a list of Catholic residents, and she walked us through the maze of hallways so we could see them one by one.

I've worked in nursing homes that emphasize getting better and going home, and in last-stop nursing homes. Although this facility had a modest therapy space, it mostly felt like a last-stop kind of place. It was a clean and reasonably pleasant last-stop place, but the people we saw were clearly in fragile health. What stood out to me was how close to the bone faith seems to be. There was the woman on oxygen, working to breathe but determined to say every word of the Our Father, and the woman who insisted that she would overcome her vertigo and sit up to receive. "My grandmother would roll in her grave if she knew I was lying down for communion," she said. There was the overtly dysarthric man we found in the therapy room. He had to struggle to say that he had left the Catholic faith for Islam because Jesus was not God, but he thought it was worth the effort. There was the confused woman we saw at the end-- she didn't know quite where we were, and she was a little worried about it, but she wanted to be sure to say an act of contrition before she received the host reverently. Afterward she kissed Pat's hand. "She always does that," he said, a little embarrassed. But it struck me as appropriate, an echo of the passage in Isaiah that says, "How beautiful are the feet of him who brings good news, announcing peace." To be a Eucharistic minister is to bring not just tidings of peace, but the actual good news, our actual peace, enfleshed.

Many of the residents were napping, and if they didn't respond when we called their names softly we would just pray for them. One of them shared my own Stella's name. I thought about her mother 90 years ago, trying to decide on the loveliest name for her lovely baby girl. In those days, as in these, her Stella's scalp showed through her sparse hair and her gums were toothless. And as I watched her sleeping I thought about my daughter, and wondered who would be praying for her 80 years from now. I hope it is engraved on her heart, now and then and in between, how deeply and everlastingly she is loved. I hope she can hold on to that truth, whatever age may take away.

In which I rip off some legs

Hi, everybody, I didn't mean to suggest that I was leaving forever now that my year of 6 posts per week is finished. I fully expect to keep posting 4-5 times per week, because I love love LOVE being in the posting groove. I love the record of our life; I love the feeling of freedom to fling up something goofy and quick because there's always tomorrow in which to write something meatier. In fact, I'll make that a Plan: I, Jamie Most Gladly, resolve to post at least 4 times a week for the next year, because it is an excellent discipline and it makes me happy almost all the time.

This is my 2000^th blog post, according to Typepad. Now a bunch of those are in the drafts folder -- lots from my first two years of blogging at a different URL, and another few dozen from various stages of this blog's life. But that's a LOT of posts, is it not? I had thought perhaps I would do something weighty for post #2000. A Reflection, maybe. But instead let's talk about ripping off jellyfish legs, shall we?

I am thinking about entropy lately. I envision entropy as a giant menacing jellyfish. MUST FIGHT OFF JELLYFISH. But jellyfish are so...squishy. And multi-limbed. And...drifty. You shout en garde! and point your sword at a jellyfish, and it just floats on over to enfold you in its multitude of venomous arms. Meanwhile you are still trying to wield your sword underwater (and breathe -- breathing is important for combat). The jellyfish has a distinct advantage here, is what I'm saying. 

Every summer I resolve to PUSH BACK against entropy and every summer I wind up sporting figurative jellyfish stings and hyperventilating.

Do you know how disgusting the banister rail on the basement stairs was? So disgusting. UnbeLIEVably disgusting. It is much less dirty after a vigorous address with Magic Eraser -- only now the aged paint is peeling off in gummy strings. It seems to have been held on by the dirt.

Our van has automatic sliding doors, and the passenger side door was a little fussy. It didn't always work the first time, or even the second time, which was mildly vexing. So I took it to the dealer for a diagnosis (bad roller), and took it back for them to replace the worn-out roller -- only to learn that they also think the rear motor on that side is failing. I used to have a sliding door that worked most of the time. Now I have a sliding door that only works if you switch off the motor and move it manually. 

I could have had that for free, I'm just saying.

Mercifully Elwood volunteered to handle the next round of Dealing with the Dealership. (That sounds like a Gilderoy Lockhart title, except that he never actually had to deal with any unpleasant entities.) We shall see how it shakes out.

On the plus side, do you remember my printer that was secretly a portal to Narnia? It now works wirelessly from all the laptops currently in use in this house. I can also scan wirelessly from my laptop and print from selected phone apps. I can't print from Evernote on my phone, which would be useful, but I have hacked off most of that particular jellyfish leg.

Also on the plus side, I have hacked and slashed my way through my inbox tray until it is reduced to three items: one that needs to be typed up in Evernote, and a Land's End coupon postcard, and something to give away. There was a LOT of stuff in that tray, you guys.

Don't ask me what happened to my email inbox while I was working on the physical inbox. I'll just be over here trying to burn my hydra jellyfish WITH FIRE before it sends me to a watery grave.

The crowded kindnesses

This is the 365th day on which I have been 46 years old, and this is the 312th post of the year. Target achieved: 6 posts per week for 52 weeks. Thanks, my friends, for reading what I had to say this year! Thank you for your insights and your encouragement and your occasional enabling! (I bought the sandals.)

Who would have thought, a year ago, that the world would look the way it does? Gosh, I would have gone down hard in a contest to predict what July 2017 would look like. Hey, who wants to play this year's version of that game? Answer the following questions, and next year I'll send a prize to the person who was most accurate.

1. Who will be president of the US on July 18, 2018?
2. What will be the most astonishing news development between now and then?
3. What about the most worrisome development internationally?
4. Open-ended: what's one more thing you think will happen between now and then? (Anything at all. You will have another baby. I will gain a thousand Twitter followers. (Don't wish that on me, actually. Twitter is a crazy place.) The Queen of England will die a peaceful death.)

I...am feeling a twinge of lingering guilt about the last time I ran a pool like this. It was December 2008 and I asked people to predict Stella's birthday, length, and weight. Then I never sent off the promised chocolate to the people who came closest. Belated apologies if you won that pool. I will probably be more successful with sending prizes when I am not adjusting to the arrival of a new baby while trying to write a dissertation.

But do you know, friends, I am not going to let worry or guilt be the note on which I end this year. I am going to take the advice of Alexander Maclaren, who said, "Seek, as a plain duty, to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life." Onward!

 

The Sandal Search

Two years ago I unwittingly made a great purchase. Sierra Trading Post had a pair of black leather Teva sandals on clearance, and I bought them. I bought them because my other sandals were falling apart and they looked like a reasonable choice, but they have turned out to be the Best Sandals Ever. I like them because they are nice enough to wear to Mass or work, but not too fancy for shorts and a T-shirt. They are practical -- no heel, sturdily made, extremely comfortable -- but not chunky like Birkenstocks. I can't even count the compliments people have given me on these sandals. I certainly can't count the number of miles I've walked in them. It's probably no surprise that they're wearing out.

The trouble is I didn't realize just how deeply discounted they were, and I am wincing at the cost of replacing them. Do you have any sandal recommendations for me, my friends? Here's a picture of the ones I love.

The Solitude Report

I spent a night alone in this house for the first time ever: one kid in NYC, one kid in New Mexico with Scouts, three kids + Elwood at the grandparents' house. It was weird to be in an empty house. I thought about blogging the weirdness, but it seemed unwise to say "Hello, internet, I am alone in my house tonight!"

What do I like to do when I am left to my own devices for a weekend? Here's the breakdown:

1. Nap. I napped both Saturday and Sunday. It is very rare for me to take a weekend nap, and I can't ever remember taking two -- not even newly postpartum.
2. Read. I finished The People We Hate at the Wedding, which pulled itself out of a deep hole at the very end. I was thinking about ditching it in the middle -- and I never, but never, ditch Kindle purchases even if I dislike them* -- but the author managed to turn it around. Fantastic characterization (too bad it runs to 50 Shades of Asshole) and good writing. I would have thought it was hilarious if I were not an over-empathizer; as it was I spent big chunks of the book feeling like I needed to breathe into a paper bag. Cautiously recommended.
3. Clean. I bought a pumice stone with which to tackle the deposits under the rim of the downstairs toilet, and it was remarkably satisfying. They're not a hundred percent gone; you can still see the remainder if you stick your head in the toilet. But I don't expect that many of my guests will stick their heads in the toilet. Let's hope not, at any rate.
4. Walk downtown. I caught a live performance Saturday night, a very young, very skilled woman with a deliciously quirky voice. And then today I took Robinson Crusoe to the coffee shop. It's really weird that Robinson Crusoe used to be regarded as a kids' book.
5. Cook. You guys, it turns out that I do still like to cook. Miso salmon with fennel and beautiful golden summer squash! Frittata with pesto! And no one complained because I was cooking for an audience of one. My cooking enthusiasm has been seriously dented by years of cooking for various picky eaters. They all seem to get un-picky as they get bigger, but the struggle is real, as the kids say. I made palak paneer tonight when Elwood returned with our 17yo, and it was such a relief to know that no one would be making sad faces at it. It's not that Stella is ill-mannered in her pickiness -- not at all. She tries so hard to say nice things about food that makes her uncomfortable. I just enjoyed a brief respite from the awareness that she was trying hard to say nice things about the food.

*I'm not saying that's a good strategy. I'm just saying it's my strategy.

So I think Elwood and I are going to see a movie, with no worries about who will manage baths and bedtime. Luxurious, yes?

Colossus of Roasts

The Instant Pot won't fit in my pantry, but I found another spot for it, and a name. I am going to call him Colossus of Roasts (Col for short, I think -- a little nod to Prydain), and tonight was his first outing.

First I pressure-cooked the CSA beets in the steamer while I prepped onion and carrots. The bigger beets needed a few additional minutes, but it was quick and easy to get them cooked through. Disclosure: I have been using a pressure cooker for years, so I have already done the mental work of thinking BUT IT MIGHT EXPLODE PERHAPS ANOTHER DAY WOULD BE BETTER. I tipped the beets into a bowl to cool, rinsed out the inner thingummy, and put it in sauté mode with the heat on max. I like my base veggies good and browned, which is the #1 disadvantage to my slow cooker: either you brown separately and have to deal with tipping all your hot food + fat into the narrower mouth of the slow cooker, or you don't brown things in advance and it winds up tasting like undifferentiated slow cooker stew. (Or at least that's my experience. Maybe I would have better luck if I didn't eschew seasoning packets?) 

Browning my onions and carrots in the Instant Pot worked swimmingly, leaving me enough time to peel and chop and dress my beets, and when the veggies were done to my liking I added two turkey legs. (Why do we have turkey legs in July, you might ask? Because I married into a family that cannot resist a bargain. My SIL picked up some astounding quantity of frozen meat on sale, and my MIL implored me to take a turkey off her hands the last time I was at her house. Elwood roasted it earlier this month.) I put the IP in soup mode with a freezer bag full of stock, and 30 minutes later the meat was falling from the bone. I fork-shredded it and scooped some out for me, and then I stirred in leftover pasta for everybody else and put the IP in "keep warm" mode.

We ate our beet salad first-- 4 chopped beets, juice of half a lemon, goat cheese and olive oil to taste along with salt and pepper, scooped into the hollow of a quartered avocado. (It didn't stay put. More like "sprawled across a quartered avocado.") Our turkey soup was an unusually frugal dish but it was also very pleasant. Col made it significantly faster than it would have been without pressure-cooking, and more streamlined than it would have been with my old pressure cooker. And cleanup, as promised, was easy-peasy.

Caveat emptor

I bought myself an Instant Pot on Prime Day. Have you been watching people rave about their Instant Pots too? It browns the meat; it cooks the rice; it hard-boils the eggs with mysterious hard-boiling magic that means they never again stick to their shells when you peel them. I added one to my Amazon wish list at some point because it's the kind of thing my mother-in-law might like to give us for our anniversary if she knew we'd been thinking about getting one. (The plural pronouns in that sentence are purely hypothetical. I did not say to Elwood, "Wouldn't you like an Instant Pot for our anniversary?" He would not have confessed to a secret hankering for an Instant Pot of our own.)

And then on Prime Day they were all over my Facebook feed. THE INSTANT POT IS ON SALE, thundered person #1. IT HAS CHANGED MY LIFE, said person #2. OH THE SECRET JOYS OF NIU JIANG, chimed in-- well, nobody said that, actually, but did you know the Instant Pot will ferment your glutinous rice for you if you push the right button? Do you have an adequate quantity of niu jiang in your life, my friend? I am betting that your fermented glutinous rice supply is pretty sparse.

So I was at work today when I got the message that my Instant Pot had been delivered, and I started thinking of all the things I might do with it. Wasn't it a good idea to buy one appliance that could replace two of my more space-hoggy kitchen items (the slow cooker and the pressure cooker)? One of my friends had said that the smaller version of the Instant Pot could only handle two artichokes at once, and I was pleased that I could look forward to the multi-artichoke version.

Then I came home to a box approximately the size of the Chrysler building. You guys, I could fit a field's worth of artichokes in this thing. Those Amazon thumbnails offer no indication of the Brobdingnagian scale of an 8-quart Instant Pot. Do you think I am exaggerating because I am a person occasionally given to exaggeration? Behold:

(Why am I running in that picture, you ask? Because the thing could house a live allosaurus, that's why, and I am uncertain about what might be wrestling the lid off from the inside even as I type these words of warning.)

So yeah, go ahead and buy an Instant Pot, because it will fill your unmet need to make congee with the push of a button like nothing else on the market. (My 17yo: "It makes Japanese characters appear with the push of a button?" I'd never realized that congee and kanji were homophones, but so they are.) Just be aware that you might need to give up one of the spots in your garage if you plan to store it on your property.

My slow cooker and pressure cooker sit cheek by jowl on the bottom shelf of our shallow pantry, tucked in with the waffle irons and the enameled cast-iron pot. But I don't think I will be able to close the door on the hulking girth of the Instant Pot. Right now it is on my music room floor while I contemplate the mysteries of the owner's manual. Between the outer box, the inner box, and the pot itself, there isn't much floor space left in our little music room.

Tonight at dinner we were talking about credit scores. My teen said (oh so sweetly), "You should write a book." "That would be a boring book," I told him, "because it would say 'Pay your bills on time every month, the end.'" He added, "And probably it would say, 'Don't buy stupid things.'"

My husband gave me some serious side-eye at that point. "I...am not feeling qualified to write that chapter of the book today," I said sheepishly.

The Flagship and the Axe

I'm waiting to hear back about an R&R.

If you're not familiar with the academic publishing process, here's how it goes: papers almost never get accepted out of the gate. That might happen once in a person's career, but it might not either. The thing about peer review is that people will virtually always use the opportunity to say, "You need to cite this other paper and define your modeling strategy more clearly," or, "You're over-extrapolating in your discussion section, so rein it in, girlfriend." This is good; this is why peer review exists. Scholarly articles can almost always be improved. The reviewers will make their recommendations to the associate editor, or directly to the editor if it's a smaller journal, and the editor/AE will make a decision: accept (very unlikely), reject (frequency varies widely by journal), revise & resubmit.

You can get a friendly little R&R decision, where you just have to update the lit review and trim a superfluous section, or you can get a big hairy R&R in which the reviewers have set you 100 different editing tasks. And you can also get a lukewarm R&R: we don't have a whole ton of things for you to change, but we're not sure if we like your paper or not. I'm waiting on feedback from a revised version of one of those right now.

The flagship journal in my field ostensibly offers a publication option that they call a research note. Unfortunately, there seems to be a mismatch between the editorial board's vision for a research note and the everyday work done by reviewers and AEs in evaluating research note submissions. This is frustrating for those of us who submit research notes. Their instructions say that the purpose of a research note is to share findings that are preliminary, or extensions of previous research, or modest in scope. And yet the reviewers -- and more exasperatingly, the AE I'm currently dealing with -- didn't get that memo.

I had a full-length research article published in this journal in 2014, and I submitted a follow-up in January: here's what happened when we considered an additional explanatory variable, known to be relevant in this population. I got some reasonable comments, but I also got some condescension: this submission may not be suitable because of its modest scope. Some of the reviewer comments made clear that they hadn't registered the category; one of them was complaining about the lack of subheadings in my method section despite the fact that research notes don't require subheadings. Technically they don't even require a method section.

It's a ticklish business, writing a response in which you have to WELL ACTUALLY the people who are deciding whether or not you get published. My co-author kept saying, "Throw them a bone, Jamie. Just throw them a bone." So I have thrown them lots of bones, and reminded them with great delicacy of the ACTUAL REQUIREMENTS of the ACTUAL MANUSCRIPT TYPE that I have written here, and if there were any justice in the world they would have written back by now to say SO SORRY; this is an awesome paper.

But they have not done so, and every time I open my work email I do so with a pre-emptive flinch. I'll be pretty bummed if it gets rejected after this resubmission, but it seems like the most likely outcome. Harrumph.

306

Last year on my birthday I resolved to post six times a week for a year. I had been thinking I was a little behind, and that I might have to do throw in some quick picture posts to hit the number target, but what do you know? I'm right on track. I will turn 47 a week from tomorrow, and if I post six more times between now and then, I will have written 312 posts, or 6 x 52, since I turned 46.

I don't expect to blog as frequently in my 48th year as I did in my 47th, but it's been a fun exercise.

A Discovery

Last month I mentioned to you that I was participating in a writing challenge. Here's how it works: you pony up $20 and you agree to write 400 words (or the equivalent in related tasks, like editing) on 5 out of every 7 days during the month of the challenge. If you miss one day, you forfeit $3; if you miss two, you forfeit $6. More than that and you lose your $20. 

On the one hand, 400 words is nothing. On the other, 8000 words is a respectable chunk of text. I found the challenge to be highly motivating and also very manageable. What I didn't realize when I signed up was that the administrator directs part of the forfeited money back to successful participants. Not only did I get ~8000 words out of the June writing challenge, I got a surprise $9. I rolled my original $20 back into the July challenge, on the Stick With What's Working principle.

If you have a back-burnered novel, or a purgatorial paper, or any other writing projects that could use an 8000-word boost, you should think about the Any Good Thing writing challenge for August. Especially you Obligers -- I bet you'd like it because of the low stakes, clear expectations, and consistent friendly feedback from the coordinator. You can have as much or as little community support as you might like to have; there's an active Facebook group but no pressure to participate.

Just like St. George, arthropod version

Oh my goodness, friends, I just smote a centipede that was, like, 6 inches long. Okay, really and truly, it was only 2+ inches long. But it was climbing the wall in my shower! Do you know what happens when a very nearsighted person gets into the shower with a big bug? She leans in close to see what that big dark smudge is, that's what she does. Just ask the person who still gets the shudders thinking about her up-close shower encounter with a silverfish in 1990.

Gah! I just did an image search for silverfish, a beastie I'd never encountered until I moved to the Midwest. It was going to be a friendly blogger thing, in which I said, "Here, let me show you what I'm talking about just in case you're unacquainted with the silverfish." But it turns out the friendly blogger course of action is to close the tab and step away. And bleach the brain. There are too many bugs in this world, my friends.

But! Back to the point: there is one less bug in the world than there was earlier this evening. I started to ask for help, but then I remembered something Elwood said to me years ago when there was a different big ugly bug causing me a different flavor of distress. He said, in a voice both kind and disbelieving, "Jamie, you have been through childbirth five times. You can handle a bug."

I repeated these words to myself. Jamie, you have been through childbirth five times. You can handle a bug. I fetched the WMD (Weapon of Millipede Destruction in this instance; I cannot distinguish between a centipede and millipede reliably but I do know that WCDs are not a thing). My flyswatter was no match for its exoskeleton, but as it wriggled, stunned but clearly plotting its revenge, I crushed it in my fist* and laid its carcass on the pyre** for destruction.

*carefully shielded by a tissue -- a bare-handed bug-crusher would not have to psych herself up first by thinking about childbirth

**if by pyre we mean the garbage can

I was going to write another post about plans and productivity tonight, but sometimes duty calls. Or sometimes duty slithers up the the bathroom wall, lurking in the shower curtain. I am waiting for the king to send a herald offering me half the kingdom and the prince's hand in marriage. I'll have to tell him I'm already married, but I expect a savvy financial guy could translate half the kingdom into our next college tuition payment.

Friday night updates

I decided to take Gretchen Rubin's quiz after all (lots of fun surprises in reading your responses to that post!), and it tells me that I am an Upholder. I am always a little skeptical about binary divisions, though. I don't have a Myers-Briggs type, because I split three of the parameters right down the middle. The first time I took it I was 16 and eager to learn The Truth about my inner workings. The guy who was administering the test looked at me skeptically when he saw my results: 10-10 for I-E, 16-4 for N, 11-9 for F-T, and 10-10 for P-J. "Were you trying to game the results?" he asked me, squinty-eyed. I hadn't been trying to game the results at all, and I was genuinely worried that he seemed so surprised. "I have no personality!" I wailed afterward. 

I do in fact have a personality. It just doesn't fit tidily into the Myers-Briggs taxonomy.

You'd think I would have learned in the intervening 31 years not to worry so much about other people's dubious binary breakdowns, but alas, here I stood in 2017 assuming I was the only Obliger around because the world is chock full of disciplined Upholders and cool Questioners and devil-may-care Rebels. But nope: not an Obliger, apparently, and if I were I'd be far from alone.

This week I have been working away on getting pictures into albums. Hold on, I feel a .gif coming on here...

...because it is not my favorite task. But I am slogging through it anyway; I'm up to November 2016. I am shaking my head about the group pictures as I go. As a family we are just plain bad at getting ourselves into an orderly group in which everybody looks at the camera and smiles. The Christmas picture is an annual exercise in "which one of these three dozen pictures is the least bad?" And if we only have a couple of shots, as in the First Communion family pictures, it's destined to be ridiculous. Throw in the least bit of technical difficulty (weirdly aimed flash at First Communion created strange pockets of glare and shadow) and you wind up with something that makes me shake my head as I stick it down on the page.

Now that the kids are bigger we have fewer pictures of people doing quirky things. We have lots of pictures of people blowing out birthday candles, and of people reading books that amuse me. I'm going to be able to make a photo montage of Stella reading Shakespeare at every age she's ever been, because I keep taking pictures of her poring over the Complete Works. This one is called Tape Measure In Motion, With Added Shakespeare. I do not remember why I thought I needed a picture of Pete playing with the tape measure. October was a long time ago. But this was our life in the fall of 2016: Pete's hair still pale from the summer sun, Stella momentarily diverted from her spot deep in the bowels of the Complete Works, books piled on the end table as always.

Politics in the classroom

I can't remember if I blogged about the assignment I set one of my undergrad classes last semester. It's a class in which I am contractually obligated to talk about the impact of public policy on the lives of children with disabilities, and I was teaching it during the semester when Donald Trump was inaugurated. I watched in disbelief as Betsy DeVos stumbled through questions about IDEA. (A hint for you, BDV: it's a federal law, not a serving suggestion.) In my free time I was making dozens of calls to elected officials. I was setting my children to work making rally posters and writing postcards. I was on fire with the desire to do something about the state of the republic, and it occurred to me: I can encourage my students to be more vocal citizens in a way that aligns with their own political views. Maybe I should do that.

It is a given for me that the students in our program regard it as their duty to promote the well-being of individuals with disabilities. I mean, a very tiny number of them might someday become dialect coaches to famous actors, or voice therapists to famous singers, but mostly they are going to be working hard to help people with disabilities gain or regain a greater measure of independence. And in whatever setting they find themselves, taxpayer dollars are likely to cover a sizable chunk of the bill. 

So I invited them to consider the ways in which public policy shapes access to services for individuals with disabilities, and to express their opinion on a policy question to an elected official. I gave them several examples; I offered them a generic script with plenty of room for their own opinions. I was careful to be as neutral as I could be: "students on the left might say that [these examples were easier to generate]; students on the right might argue that [I had to think more carefully about these but DERNIT think I did]." I said explicitly in class: "A lot of the voices in the conversation about disability-related public policy fall on the left side of the political spectrum, and I want to say directly to more conservative students that your views are very welcome here. I do not want you to feel any pressure to voice an opinion that you feel uncomfortable with." I gave them a month in which to make their one phone call, and extra credit for sharing any reply they received, and if they didn't follow instructions I gave them more chances to get it right. I do not usually have much patience for upperclassmen who don't follow instructions, but for this assignment I sucked it up. I really wanted them to know that their voices could make a difference. That their legislators' job is to represent constituents, even the 21-year-old constituents who feel nervous about calling them.

During the semester, I got exclusively positive feedback on this assignment. Every student who commented on it before May offered some version of "Wow, this was so informative!" or "This was empowering!" or "I didn't know it was so easy to make my voice heard!" But when I read the course evals last month, that assignment was the most frequent complaint I got. On about 6 of the evals (in a class of 40, so 15%), that was the thing students wanted me to get rid of. "Keep politics out of the classroom," said one.

I have been mulling this over, especially the split between the direct feedback and the indirect feedback. I am very curious about what those six or so students were thinking. I suppose it's possible that they believe the state has no obligation to citizens with disabilities, in which case there wouldn't really be a satisfactory way for them to complete the assignment. I suppose it's possible that it felt really stressful and hassle-ful to make that one phone call, especially for the students who had to re-do it. (I was genuinely shocked at the number of students who did not understand that you can't ask your state legislator to take action on a bill before Congress, or vice versa. I tried so hard to spell it out clearly in the instructions, but a bunch of them just didn't get it the first time around.) Maybe for some of them there was a moment of cognitive dissonance in thinking, "I am training to provide services to people with disabilities but some of the folks in my political party are moving to limit taxpayer-funded services to people with disabilities." Or is that an arrogant lefty kind of thing to think?

One of the things I wanted my students to take from the assignment is that there are lots of conversations we need to have about how to provide expensive services to a diverse population. I felt like I was bending over backward to welcome a variety of perspectives. But apparently it didn't feel that way to some of my students.

Obligers, upholders, habits, and goals

Summertime is my season for thinking about making changes and getting stuff done, and so I've been been mulling over strategies lately. Gretchen Rubin's book Better Than Before talks a lot about understanding yourself as a key to changing your habits. She has developed a framework -- her forthcoming book is all about this framework -- that describes differences in motivation. 

Hold on, there must be a google-able image I can share...

...Oh, look, an image and a quiz. Want to take it and share in the comments?

I haven't taken the quiz because I don't think I need to. I am an aspiring upholder. I have upholder inclinations. But I have some definite obliger stuff going on as well. From the moment I read her descriptions, this bothered me. It was as if (in my mind) the upholders were the good kind of people and everybody else just needed to grow up. Those obligers should just pick up their marbles and go home.

And then, after an embarrassingly long time, it dawned on me that this attitude was unlikely to prove productive. What if I just acknowledged those obliger tendencies? Just a tiny bit of external accountability does great things for me: a blog post, or (sometimes) a Rav forum post, or stating my goals for the month while I am meeting a work friend for coffee. The half-marathon group I did last summer is the reason I finished my half-marathon. The sidebar checklists I used to post here were unbelievably motivating for me; I would practically salivate at the prospect of opening up the editor and adding a <del>. Maybe the best example is the Crazy Shakespeare Project. At the time I felt guilty because it took me 53 weeks (rather than 52) to read 17 Shakespeare plays plus the poetry, but in hindsight I have to say that was a pretty successful undertaking.

Maybe it's better to work with the way I am put together instead of wishing I were put together differently. (You think, Jamie?)

Here's the other thing I have been mulling over: I like working toward goals better than working on habits. There are lots and lots of voices saying that habit-building is the the golden key to a full and happy life free of periodontal disease. And I can see their point, sure, but habits don't give a person as many opportunities to open the editor and add a <del>. Habit formation leaves me feeling like I am inching forward when I want to swoop.

One of the pro-habit/anti-goal writers I read recent-ish-ly said it was better to work on a habit of daily exercise than to say "I will spend 18 weeks preparing for my first marathon!" He said that scenario set people up for falling off the exercise wagon: the marathon ends, and so does the training program, and it's back to eating Doritos on the couch for our marathoner. I read this and winced: my own exercise routine tanked after my half-marathon in September, and didn't really recover until 10K training in the spring.

So clearly, it's a both-and situation: you can't hit the goal of running the marathon without the habit (or at least the four-month habit) of serious exercise. A person can set up successive goals that feed habit formation. But it's probably helpful for me to know this about myself: I do best with a clear and ambitious goal, a deadline that is optimistic but not crazy, and a little bit of an audience. It took me three tries to type the "little bit of an audience" part, because I still wish I could be sufficiently motivated by the goal itself. 

It occurs to me that this discovery should not be surprising. A person who just entered her fourteenth year of blogging is clearly a person who might like a little bit of an audience. Even so, I am wincing a little at myself. So tell me about you, please: upholder? obliger? rebel? questioner? And habits or goals or both?

Self-evident

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that the Fourth of July requires potato salad, and that the making thereof is an act of resistance against would-be authorangeitarians. It's been ten years since I posted my potato salad recipe for the Fourth of July, but some things never change. (Except that I do usually cook my eggs separately these days. I prefer eggs to simmer and potatoes to boil vigorously, and I don't mind washing an extra pan nearly as much as I did in 2007.)

Yours in the pursuit of freedom and bacon,
JMG